Swing Low Sweet Chariot Nursery Rhyme Lyrics

Description:

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is an American negro spiritual. The earliest known recording was in 1909, by the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” may have been written by Wallis Willis, a Choctaw freedman in the old Indian Territory in what is now Choctaw County, near the County seat of Hugo, Oklahoma sometime after 1865. He may have been inspired by the Red River, which reminded him of the Jordan River and of the Prophet Elijah’s being taken to heaven by a chariot. Some sources claim that this song and “Steal Away” (also sung by Willis) had lyrics that referred to the Underground Railroad, the freedom movement that helped black people escape from Southern slavery to the North and Canada.